Sheikh Rashid: The ruler who built for the Dubai that did not yet exist

Dubai: Thirty-six years after the death of Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, his imprint on Dubai is easy to find. It is there in the creek he deepened, the airport he opened, the ports he built and the roads and crossings that connected a rapidly expanding city.

But perhaps his more consequential legacy is less visible: a way of thinking about the future.

Sheikh Rashid, who died on October 7, 1990, after 32 years as Ruler of Dubai, governed during a period when the emirate had neither the wealth nor the global stature it possesses today.

Yet many of the projects that now seem inevitable were conceived when there was little evidence that Dubai would one day require them.

That instinct, to build for a need before the need arrived, became one of the defining characteristics of Dubai’s development.

The UAE will mark the 36th anniversary of Sheikh Rashid’s death on Wednesday, a day after his son, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, published a deeply personal tribute describing his father as his “first teacher”, “first leader” and “first inspiration”.

In the letter, Sheikh Mohammed recalled watching his father carry a small compass during his travels to find the direction of the Qibla for prayer.

“Your compass is still with us,” he wrote, turning the object into a metaphor for the principles Sheikh Rashid left behind: justice, respect for people, support for traders, careful use of resources and a relentless focus on building for the future.

The image is particularly fitting because Sheikh Rashid’s most enduring decisions were often about direction rather than scale.

Sheikh Rashid assumed power in Dubai in 1958, at a difficult moment in the Gulf’s economic history. The collapse of the pearl trade had damaged livelihoods across the region, Dubai remained a relatively small trading settlement and the oil revenues that would later transform parts of the Gulf had not yet arrived.

The constraints did not produce caution.

Instead, Sheikh Rashid pursued what would become a recurring principle of Dubai’s development: infrastructure should not merely respond to economic growth; it could create the conditions for that growth.

Dubai Creek has been an early test of that conviction.

For generations, the creek had been the commercial heart of the city, but silting increasingly restricted the movement of larger vessels. During the 1950s and 1960s, it was dredged and widened, with its banks developed to improve access for shipping and commerce.

The work was expensive for a city with limited resources. But judging it only by its immediate cost would have missed Sheikh Rashid’s calculation. A deeper creek meant larger vessels. Larger vessels meant more trade. More trade meant a larger economy.

It was an approach he would repeat on a far greater scale.

Dubai Airport opened on September 30, 1960, initially with a compacted sand runway and a small terminal capable of handling aircraft up to the size of a DC-3. It arrived decades before Dubai became one of the world’s great aviation centres.

The significance was larger than the airport itself. For a city whose prosperity depended on its connections with the outside world, aviation offered another route through which people, capital and commerce could reach Dubai.

Roads and crossings followed. Al Maktoum Bridge, the first bridge across Dubai Creek, opened in 1963. Al Shindagha Tunnel later created another connection between Deira and Bur Dubai. The projects helped bind together a city expanding on both sides of the water.

Then came the ports.

Port Rashid was completed with 11 berths in 1972 and quickly proved successful. Four years later, Sheikh Rashid ordered something far more ambitious: the construction of Jebel Ali Port.

Completed in 1979, the project was conceived on a scale that exceeded Dubai’s immediate requirements. Rather than waiting for commerce to grow large enough to justify such a port, the city created the capacity around which commerce could grow.

That distinction helps explain much of Sheikh Rashid’s approach.

He was not trying only to solve the problems Dubai had. He was attempting to anticipate the problems — and opportunities — that a larger Dubai would encounter.

Seen from present-day Dubai, decisions to build an international airport, major ports and large transport projects can appear obvious.

They were not obvious when they were made.

Their value lay precisely in the absence of certainty.

Sheikh Rashid was making investments for a city that, in many respects, existed only in his imagination. He was effectively asking not what Dubai required at that moment, but what it would require if its ambitions succeeded.

That philosophy remains visible in the emirate’s development today. Mattar Al Tayer, director-general and chairman of the Board of Executive Directors of Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority, has cited Sheikh Rashid’s decisions to establish Dubai International Airport, Port Rashid and Jebel Ali Port among the transformative projects that helped enable Dubai’s subsequent economic expansion.

Sheikh Rashid’s leadership, however, was not confined to concrete, harbours and runways.

Dubai’s administrative institutions developed alongside its physical infrastructure. The city required government capable of managing land, trade, public services, policing, utilities and an increasingly complex economy.

The logic was the same: infrastructure without institutions could take a city only so far.

He was also known for maintaining a short distance between decision-making and execution, visiting projects and markets, meeting traders and residents and following work on the ground.

In Sheikh Mohammed’s recollection of his father, leadership was similarly stripped of ceremony. He described learning that a leader did not need to raise his voice, that credibility was a form of currency, that resources should not simply be conserved but used to produce the greatest benefit, and that the early hours before dawn were valuable for thinking, decisions and following up on major projects.

Sheikh Rashid’s largest legacy ultimately extended beyond the emirate he ruled.

On February 18, 1968, he met Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, then Ruler of Abu Dhabi, at Al Sameeh near the border between the two emirates.

The two leaders agreed on a federation between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and invited other rulers in the region to join.

That agreement became the critical first step towards the establishment of the United Arab Emirates on December 2, 1971.

Sheikh Rashid went on to serve as the UAE’s Vice President, alongside Sheikh Zayed as President, while continuing to oversee Dubai’s development.

His death in 1990 closed one chapter of that story, but not the development model he helped establish.

Dubai today bears little physical resemblance to the city Sheikh Rashid inherited in 1958.

Its airport connects hundreds of destinations, Jebel Ali is one of the world’s major maritime and logistics hubs, and infrastructure projects extend across a metropolis whose population and economy would have been difficult to imagine during the early years of his rule.

Yet Sheikh Mohammed’s letter suggests that continuity matters more than resemblance.

“Every achievement we make bears something of you,” he wrote, describing every new ambition as an extension of his father’s dreams.

That may be the clearest way to understand Sheikh Rashid’s legacy 36 years after his death.

It is larger than an airport, a port, a bridge or a road. It is the conviction that limited resources are not necessarily a reason to postpone ambition; they can be a reason to think more carefully about where to place it.

Sheikh Rashid spent much of his rule building things before Dubai appeared to need them.

Time eventually supplied the demand.

And perhaps the question that defined his leadership was never simply, What does Dubai need today?

It was: What will Dubai need tomorrow?